Digital imaging has notable advantages over traditional imaging, which processes an image of a physical object onto a physical medium. Digital imaging help users such as health professionals avoid the costs of expensive processing equipment, physical paper, physical radiographs, and physical film. Techniques such as digital radiography expose patients to lower doses of radiation than traditional radiography and are often safer than their traditional counterparts are. Moreover, digital images are easy to store on storage such as a computer's hard drive or a flash memory card, are easy transferable, and are more portable than traditional physical images. Further, many digital imaging devices use sophisticated image manipulation techniques and filters that accurately image physical objects. A health professional's information infrastructures and the business processes can therefore potentially benefit from digital imaging techniques.
Though digital imaging has many advantages over physical imaging, digital imaging technologies are far from ubiquitous in health offices as existing digital imaging technologies present their own costs. To use existing digital imaging technologies, a user such as a health professional has to purchase separate computer terminals and software licenses for each treatment room. As existing technologies install a full digital imaging package on each computer terminal, these technologies are often expensive and present users with more options than they are willing to pay for. Additionally, existing digital imaging technologies require users to purchase a complete network infrastructure to support separate medical imaging terminals. Users often face the prospects of ensuring software installed at separate terminals maintains patient confidentiality, accurately stores and backs up data, accurately upgrades, and correctly performs maintenance tasks. As such, existing digital imaging technologies are not readily compatible with the objectives of end-users, such as health professionals.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.